Inside the hotel shaking up tourism on the Mornington Peninsula

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The jackalope looms large in North American folklore as the flesh-goring furball that resulted from the union of a jackrabbit and an antelope — an impossible hybrid that mimics the human voice and makes short work of a whisky bottle. It’s a fantastic conceit that was supposedly fleshed into a confirmed species in the 1930s when two Wyoming taxidermists made the most of an illicit moonshine culture (the quick drink to delusion) and created one critter from the grafting of two. “Only in America,” is the typical reply to the telling of this tall tale, but if recent sightings are to be believed, the jackalope has jumped continent and consciousness to hide within the vines of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.

“Yes, it’s true,” says Louis Li, the Chinese-born hotel scion who has taken the story of the near-extinct jackalope and spun its surrealist content across a new boutique hotel and hospitality brand. “Luxury should be defined by rarity and this legendary creature has been in my head for over seven years.”

The affable entrepreneur, whose 10 years of living in Melbourne tells in such phrases as “soooo try-hard”, frames his enthralment with the tale of the whisky-bingeing bunny in terms of an education in film and a chance encounter in Berlin.

“Film-making taught me how to identify a narrative and tell a story through different forms,” he says, insisting that a hotel property is perfect for the unfurling of fable. “Seven years ago I was at the Berlin Film Festival and found this creature in an antique shop. I’d never seen anything like it. The shop owner told me it was a jackalope. So I did a bit of research and became obsessed.”

That obsession lay dormant until 2013, when the mercurial Li found a potential lair in the 11-hectare Willow Creek Vineyard, in Merricks North (an hour’s drive from Melbourne). “I thought, ‘This is rural land’, and just like the incongruent antelope horns on the rabbit, I decided it needed a contemporary form.”

Knowing that Melbourne actively seeks to embed contradictions in its cityscape and loves to support a harebrained scheme, Li sought recommendations for the “the right top-tier talent” and briefed for the formal realisation of his fable in the build of a boutique hotel.

“Sue Carr [of the Carr Design Group] was the first designer on board and I said, ‘This is the story, this is my obsession and I want guests to walk into my mind,’” he says. “Then I approached [designer] Fabio Ongarato to create the Jackalope brand, when the strategy was realised, we came back to the architecture and decided on alchemy as a way of staging the guest experience.”

And that experience, sequenced with the mise-en-scène mastery of a film noir auteur, opens on the sculpted black bulk of Jackalope — a seven-metre horned bunny by Melbourne artist Emily Floyd that indelibly states the identity of place as playful but seductively peculiar. It sits on haunches over a circular drive that separates the old Willow Creek cellar door (rebadged and revamped into the Rare Hare by Projects of Imagination) from the Darth Vader-dark new hotel, where 46 rooms of modernist, monochrome luxury splay from a corridor with an illusory quality worthy of a Stanley Kubrick film.

“I like the idea that people walk into Jackalope and just lose their identity,” says Li. “They should forget who they are, where they are, and be part of the story.” That story flows into Doot Doot Doot, the 80-seat fine-dining venue with a ceiling froth of 10,020 champagne-hued vintage bulbs, designed by Jan Flook to simulate the fermentation process.

That’s entirely doable when indulging in the alchemy of executive chef, Guy Stanaway, and Willow Creek’s head winemaker, Geraldine McFaul, whose 2015 sauvignon blanc begs a glass or three, followed by a lie down in one of the upper-level guest rooms. The ultimate choice is the Lair suite: 85 square metres of sumptuous sleeping, dining, bathing and lounging that looks out over the 30-metre infinity pool to the wider terroir.

“People don’t know what they want until they see it,” says Li, hinting that another Jackalope will soon jump into Melbourne and start scoffing the whisky. “But when they see it, they’ll believe it.”

Inside the hotel shaking up tourism on the Mornington Peninsula

Surrealist, luxurious, bucolic yet modern, Jackalope, a new winery hotel on the Mornington Peninsula, plays with the folkloric incongruity of its mythic namesake. By Annemarie Kiely. Photographed by Sharyn Cairns and styled by Glen Proebstel.

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Surrealist, luxurious, bucolic yet modern, Jackalope, a new winery hotel on the Mornington Peninsula, plays with the folkloric incongruity of its mythic namesake. By Annemarie Kiely. Photographed by Sharyn Cairns and styled by Glen Proebstel.

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